GOP's Benghazi Smoking Gun Goes Up in Smoke

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/10/benghazi-libya-state-emails

When a set of State Department emails were released Wednesday, one reporting that a local Islamist militia had claimed responsibility for the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya, conservatives thought they had the smoking gun that the Obama administration had lied about what had occurred.

Reuters reported Wednesday that on September 11—the day of the attack—a State Department email with the subject header "Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack" was sent to the White House. The message stated that "Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli." Case closed, conservatives said: The White House had engaged in a cover-up.

There's only one problem—well, actually, there are many, but one big one: The email appears to have been incorrect. Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi, the group suspected of attacking the consulate, never claimed responsibility for the assault. In fact, according to Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who monitors jihadist activity online, Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi didn't post about the attack on its Facebook or Twitter page until September 12, the day after the attack.

Even if the State Department email had been accurate, conservatives pounced on it eagerly without underlying corroboration, thereby providing a pretty good example of how complicated intelligence analysis can be and why it's a bad idea to simply jump on a piece of information that fits your preconceived biases.

GOP really has a smokeless gun and the right wing jumped it, showing that whole party has a problem with keeping their mouths shut before and after they think they know something, they are not in the WH they don't consider ramifications of their "i got ya" tactics brings to mind another example of their duplicitous anti secret secret agenda Valarie Plame.  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-994753.html,  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=0,  they want to talk about smoking guns?  bricks in a glass house danderous.

The email was just one piece of information gathered in the aftermath of the attack. While the White House's initial explanation that the attack had begun as a protest turned out to be wrong, the email itself doesn't bear on two of the major remaining questions: what role the video played and whether the attack was planned or spontaneous.

You'd think that this would be obvious, but in the future it's a good idea to remember that just because someone posts something on Facebook, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Even better: Just because someone said someone posted something on Facebook doesn't mean it's true. Even if you really, really want it to be.

teaching point to republicans "desperate leaps before can damage the jump result after"